I was brought up in the traditional manner, by chain smoking adults who dipped my dummy in Guinness to help me sleep. I’m not sure how much this informed my choice of Father’s Day activity this year – getting really drunk then going to a zoo – but in any case it didn’t happen. Instead, I attended an event at Nid’s nursery on the understanding that I would not be expected to sing, dance (and I include rhythmic clapping in this category) or join in anything whatsoever. My concerns were, however, unfounded. It was a pleasant afternoon with other fathers who I suspect were attending under similar terms, saying ‘Is there a bar in here?’ and ‘Mine’s a Kronenburg if you find it’, and enjoying dad-style chuckles while Nid chewed books and looked on thoughtfully. Incidentally, I have picked Nid up from nursery while drunk on two occasions, and found being in a room full of bright colours and tiny blundering humans hilarious, although I prudently disguised this as simply being very happy to see him. Also, as I dropped him off recently, one of the staff pointed out a quantity of blood in my hair from a head wound sustained by jumping into a bookshelf when England beat Columbia on penalties. With this kind of form, it seems likely that at least one of us will get taken into care quite soon. Anyway. As Sid gnawed his way through This Rabbit, That Rabbit and the Wheels On The Bus I contemplated the correct etiquette for children chewing communal books. It seems unhygienic, but then so does having a child in the first place, so I decided to let it go.
My usual group parenting takes place at ‘Who Let The Dads Out?’ mornings at the local church hall, or afternoons with the Coffee Mums, which I was relieved to discover is not a clumsy East Anglian term for women of mixed racial heritage. ‘Who Let T
he Dads Out?’ consists of bluffing my way through conversations about sugar beet with agricultural workers, whereas as a Coffee Mum I am considered quite exotic for having been to Selfridges. This is not to pander to the usual lazy idea of Norfolk being mono-cultural; it isn’t middle class enough for that. For example, there is a German at ‘Who Let The Dads Out?’, an engineer working on the not inconsiderable problem of heating the many remote farm buildings in this area. He seems a decent sort, even when Germany got sent home from the World Cup for being beastly, but I am keeping an eye on him, just to be on the safe side. Similarly, at nursery, the play leader of Rock Pool group, where Nid is a penguin of some kind, is Mancunian. As a result, he has starting to say ‘Hiya’, her standard greeting. While this is a useful addition to his lexicon, otherwise consisting of ‘Daddy’ (which he calls his mother), ‘dog dog’ (which he calls me), and ‘Ahhhh’ (which he calls the dog), he is saying it in an undeniably Mancunian accent. I discussed this with ‘Anton’, a man from Deptford whose daughter, having lived in Manchester and Leeds for eight years, now sounds like Gracie Fields. We’ve met her before actually, years ago in the last blog when we were market traders, and you may recall that her graduation ceremony took place in the same building against which she was conceived. I’ve had a quiet word with the chief nursery lady, who attended Cheltenham Ladies College for what appears to have been about four hundred years, and we have agreed that she will be sacked in the morning*.
I would leave Nid
with Joe and Becka when at Runton, but considering they already have nineteen children, I’d feel like I was taking the piss. That said, he is an increasingly familiar sight there, stumping around, feeding goats through the petting zoo fences and laughing at Graham’s dogs tearing about the place with our own ever-game hound. Open space and fresh air are bad for children though, so when my current girlfriend is not in evidence, he is usually to be found playing in the wallpaper ‘Anton’ and I have scraped from the inside of the Old Servants’ Quarters while we all listen to the World Cup on the radio. We were pleased with England’s overall performance and that we have players who seem likeable, earnest and committed both to each other and the greater cause. It was difficult to say that about the squad when it had people like Rooney, Terry, Lampard, Jenas and Sturridge in it. That said, although my fondness for the England side is renewed, I am aggrieved that I had to wait twenty eight years to see them in a World Cup semi final, whereas Nid managed to do it in eighteen months. It seems most unfair.
*This is not true. She is a marvellous nurse in a marvellous nursery and, in common with all the other children, staff and parents, Nid is very fond of her.
Photards – this weeks’ studies in film are:
Main – some sheep. I started to count them, but fell asleep.
Top inset – Joe teaching the petting zoo goats how to wash up.
Middle inset – apprehensive Nid stumping around the East Anglian countryside like an Ewok, with my current girlfriend, his mother.
Lower inset – a glade or hamlet or something. Water meadow? I dunno.
A ‘sea fret’ is a persistent fog carried inland by warm air blowing across cold water, whereupon it clings to the earth, turning June into February and ruining early season ice cream van trade for miles around. They are, as Norfolk folk say, ‘holly reasty’ – ie, ‘wholly rancid’ – and, much as it would amuse me to meet someone actually called Holly Reasty, I agree with them. While Runton escaped the worst of the unseasonal murkiness, the ‘rhythm of life’ – the name that people in these parts give what is clearly an carnival of death – was interrupted. The fret-addled combination of hard summer earth and slick wet grass is hazardous to sighthounds, such as the ones belonging to Graham, who can slip and damage tendons while operating at high speed. Sighthounds operating at high speed is, in turn, hazardous to the rabbits they are chasing, such as the ones on the Runton Estate, who enjoyed a bonus month of damp untroubled frolicking as a result. Shearing the petting zoo animals was also postponed as it was too cold to take their jumpers off and, when it eventually did take place, Joe fancied a pop at it. Slithering about the enclosure unfettered by skill or experience and under sustained assault by an Angora goat, he swiftly resorted to the language of the public bar, inappropriate for Becka’s watching forest school kids who thankfully drowned it out with cheering and laughter.
the arrival of summer, a tradition which also seems to have disappeared. Still, not before time, I suppose, all things considered. I can no longer remember whether the girls who have nice tits were good or bad or, most likely, both for feminism, but I hope they are still happy because if they can’t enjoy major sporting events or get into university, there’s no hope for the rest of us. That said, most of my World Cup consumption has been via BBC radio, as God intended, while decorating the Old Servant’s Quarters with the incredibly expensive wallpaper ordered by After Lunch and Falafel For Lunch 
To return to the meteorological theme, sea frets are the ‘mist rolling in from the sea’ from Paul McCartney’s ’70s bagpipe-athon Mull of Kintyre. There is a problem though: sea frets are peculiar to the east coast, but the Mull of Kintyre is on the west, opposite Northern Ireland. I’m afraid the 114 year old mop top has lied to us, and I am not the first to say so: the amputee Heather Mills made similar claims throughout their divorce proceedings. When called upon to provide character witnesses, McCartney chose Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and the Head of NASA, suggesting a certain amount of social connectedness. Additionally, he was represented by Baroness Shackleton of Belgravia, whose clients include the actual Queen of England, and Nicholas Mostyn, a prominent high court judge. Faced with this onslaught, Mills ambitiously chose to represent herself. In her introductory notes to the court, she claimed to have been recently nominated for a Nobel prize and that her mother had also lost a leg in a motorcycle accident but that, unlike hers, it had grown back.
We live in a world of magic, where flimsy old Leicester City can win the Premiership and a black Freemason can become President of the USA. In this heady atmosphere, with the sky the limit and no dream too wild, there is no reason why I shouldn’t be a mobile hairdresser. To this end, I have been reborn as the Bicycle Barber, a reference to my mode of transport, and have already amassed a plucky client list of six people, one of whom is very elderly and expects to be dead by Christmas. It’s a modest start but, despite people misreading my business cards as ‘The Bisexual Barber’ more times than you might think, I have my hustle decidedly on. Elsewhere, I am considering a weekend barbering pitch at Greenwich Market, thereby laying the foundation for an unexpected return to London and a collective raising of eyebrows which, come to think of it, I can trim as part of a wider grooming service. Closer to my adoptive East Anglian home, I am sizing up the more traditional rural markets, and am tempted to combine hair cutting and key cutting under the tag line ‘How different can it be?’ for a larf. These are giddy times.
trouble you. Admittedly, there would be a temptation to give anyone with My Way as their funeral song a bad haircut for presumably being awful when they were alive, but otherwise I was quite taken with the idea. Being the Bicycle Barber involves, reasonably enough, a lot of cycling, during which you have to think about something to pass the time. Clattering towards Bergh Apton last week, I even formulated the fictitious daily banter between me and an equally fictitious funeral director, probably called Martin, as I expect that’s the kind of name a funeral director would have. ‘Did he like his haircut?’ he would ask as I packed away my clippers and combs, and I’d say ‘Well, there were no complaints!’ and we’d have a little chuckle like we always do and I’d put my coat on and prepare to leave. ‘See you tomorrow, then!’ he’d then say as I left, ‘one way…’ then nod towards the mortuary’ ‘… or the other!’ We’d have another chuckle, and I’d go home, perhaps after saying ‘Not if I see you first!’ or something similar. It would be such a gentle, urbane place to work if it didn’t only exist in my mind. Meanwhile, in the relentless world of reality, my ever-loyal old dear has done her best to drum up support by introducing me to her Women’s Institute friends with ‘This is my son, Paul. He’s a barber, but he isn’t very good yet’.
planning to visit East Anglia any time soon and if they might like to pop in. They are white girls with guitars who do cover versions, enough to set alarm bells ringing in the ears of music lovers, but a sure-fire winner with middle class glampers, who love that sort of thing. Well, that and Beyonce, but we can’t afford her. I saw the Mona Lisa Twins at the only Beatles convention I’ve ever been to, despite my obsession with the Fabulous Mop Tops. It was an enjoyable experience, and among the vendors and dealers and tribute acts I was struck by how many people were wandering around in full impersonation of one or other Beatle, by how much attention they each got, and by how much anyone dressed as Yoko was completely ignored.
On our overcrowded planet, a new baby is born every three or four days. This happens at the end of pregnancy, which takes nine months – it used to be six, but it takes longer now, what with women having to juggle careers and what not. Despite this, watching a little baby grow in a lady’s stomach is fascinating, although experiences of pregnancy differ from person to person. It had almost no effect on me, for example, whereas my current girlfriend craved full English breakfasts on demand throughout, fifteen years of vegetarianism going out of the window at a work function when she found herself falling upon spare ribs ‘like a tyrannosaurus rex’. I developed a craving for not having to cook sausages and bacon and eggs all the time but stuck to my task without complaint, and the dog developed a craving for an endless supply of uneaten bacon rind and pork fat leftovers. Thus, we shared the burden of pregnancy equally.
who, according to a children’s cartoon from the 1980s was ‘friend of the animal world’. The pregnancy was complicated because our child is mixed race, what with my current girlfriend being middle class. Well, I assume the middle class are a different race, anyway. They live in socially cleansed areas and have their own Olympics with sports that no one’s ever heard of, most recently held in Pyeongchang. That said, I was pleased that Team Great Britain bought home gold in Talking About Glastonbury and General Hysteria. I imagine the vegan avocado oriented celebratory buffet was pretty weak though, because a) they hate themselves and b) they can’t digest anything, unlike normal, stronger, people. I sought to redress the balance when writing to my son before he was born by explaining that Brexit and food allergies were invented by the middle class so that they could feel discriminated against, that artisan baking is for wankers, and that if in later life he should feel attracted to people of the opposite sex, I would still accept him even though his mother would be heartbroken at having a heterosexual child. Later, I managed to avoid a middle class birth certificate on his behalf. These are like normal birth certificates, except that no gender is recorded until the child has given permission for an assumption to be made on the subject. We also met our midwife, a special type of lady doctor trained in women’s things. Midwives are especially important once the contraptions start, signalling that the baby is on the way. Our midwife took everyone’s mind off things by talking about dogs so much that I suspected she was actually a vet, and that instead of the one child we were expecting we would be moved to the airing cupboard and produce a litter of six.
As it turned out, no surgery was required except deft forceps work by our midwife, whose reassuringly forthright approach meant that ‘Stop buggering about’ were the first words our son heard although, as has since been pointed out, if he takes after his father he’ll certainly be hearing them again. A final rush and push – and that’s it. That’s childbirth. You stand for the national anthem, and then a tiny, squawking, horror story gnome version of yourself is thrust towards you, covered in someone else and very, very unhappy. If there was magic in the air I didn’t notice, but I do remember a feeling of calm, despite all the furious screaming. It was as if everything that had ever happened, or would ever happen, and history and creation, and the planets and the stars and the universes, and all things known and unknowable, were looking down and agreeing that the tribulations of the ages had been worthwhile for this precise moment to occur. It was a nice feeling. I also noted with amusement two junior staff members openly flirting with each other on the other side of the room – a magnificent effort under the circumstances. As if foreseeing his father’s future barbering exploits, our son was born with a head of hair so full it merged with his eyebrows, which were strong and expressive, a hallmark of the mighty houses of Whitehead and Sinclair making up my contribution to his dna. There was also his mother’s professed slight resemblance to a female version of Paul McCartney in 1963. He could only have belonged to us.
faint, and instead cut the umbilical cord, which was grey and had the consistency of raw bacon fat. I tried to do it in one go, but missed the last little bit, so it had to be a two-snip job. It was a fittingly imperfect introduction to an imperfect world, and while I avoided fainting, I saw my grandfather, to whom my uncle had been relaying the story thirty years previously, in the tiny damp upturned face yelling at me as if all this was my fault. I handed him to my current girlfriend, whereupon all the people in the operating theatre gave me a round of applause, and went outside to announce the news. People kept holding doors open for me because I was still wearing my operating theatre stuff and they thought I was a surgeon. It was four o’clock on a mid-December morning and freezing as I stood in the bus stop outside the hospital and rang my old dear. Unable to sleep with anticipation, she had been watching Patrick Swayze ‘in a film with a ghost, and then he died deliberately’. While happy beyond expression, she also had concerns, chief among them being that her new grandson was wearing a hat. I assured her that he was. For a larf I told her that a baby boy born at Christmas is known as a bauble which, being carried away with events, she almost believed.
At Runton, spring has sprung with an audible boing, and the first glorious weather of the year has transformed a misty, muddy wilderness into a shiny, sunny place-to-be. The clinking of portable cafetieres and terrified Brexit and kale related chatter from the Fallow Field heralds the arrival of the glampers and their weak non-binary children. An eavesdropper by an open window in the Old Servants’ Quarters might overhear the flapping of flip charts and the spirited condemnation of NASA from the Flat Earth Society, who have commandeered the entire ground floor. Elsewhere, Becka has once again organised the forest school children into ‘fun groups’ and set them to work scouring rust from the Victorian greenhouse with Brillopads. There is deaf yoga in the Restored Barn on Wednesdays and Fridays, some hippy teaching basketry outside the Keeper’s Cottage at weekends, and even Graham’s dogs, trained to chase adult rabbits, allow the carpet of baby kits covering the West Field to bobble and romp undisturbed. The sunshine has revived everything and, as ‘Anton’ put it, ‘even miserable bastards are walking around with the half hard’.
Like Joseph and Mary with Jesus, my current girlfriend and I started a family relatively late in life. I had just dropped off, having been awake for thirty hours, when the mother-to-be imparted the joyous tidings, which I celebrated by mumbling ‘Oh fuck off’ in amused disbelief and going back to sleep. Twelve hours later I ran downstairs and said ‘Hang on, you’re what?’, and we carefully re-examined the evidence, because I don’t like children and becoming a father felt like a bit of an own goal. In case you are unfamiliar, you spend a lot of time during a pregnancy peering at smudges on monitors which represent your burgeoning offspring, and it wasn’t until I saw the first of these, a couple of months later, that the penny dropped. It didn’t help that I had lost a contact lens and couldn’t see the screen, instead feigning squinted interest at what could well have been the car park, outside the window in the room in which we sat. My current girlfriend, not for the last time wondering at what point she had thought this would be a good idea, indicated a seat closer to where the tiny white ventricles were indeed beating away. They were beating really fast. I was careful not to look for too long in case it triggered an epileptic seizure – I’m not epileptic, but I was having a shocker and didn’t want to chance it. Still, the news was now beyond doubt: my current girlfriend had gone and got herself in trouble. All being well, I would produce a new human being, again like Joseph and Mary, at Christmas.
n, and there you were, in a room in a clinic in Norfolk at twenty to twelve on a Friday morning. Or rather, your mother looked at the screen (and burst into tears). I squinted at it from the other side of her, because I lost my remaining contact lens throwing a ball for the dog last Sunday, and can’t see anything with certainty if it’s more than a foot away. I was bluffing a bit, saying oh yes, the miracle of life, and so forth, and the nurse, Claire, said I could come closer if I’d forgotten my glasses. I let her think that rather than tell her about losing my contact lens throwing a ball for the dog, in case she revoked my fatherhood licence. I was amazed at how fast your heart was beating, and how relatively large it was – about the size of a suitcase, on an adult. On the screen, it reminded me of the cursor on the tele-printer they use for the footie results. I’d apologised to Claire for looking scruffy due to accidentally throwing Gold Blend down myself on the journey in, during which your mother discovered that the smell of coffee now makes her nauseous instead of being her favourite thing in the world. That’s hormones for you. Claire printed us several pictures (which I’m sure you’ll see in due course) and I have one as my phone wallpaper. If I’m looking at it correctly, you’re lying on your back facing away from the camera, attached to (I think) a foetal sac, which contains a yolk that you’ll absorb and turn into a placenta. Grim. There were the remains of another egg, so it could be that you absorbed that too (I’d do the same in your situation, so don’t feel bad), but it any case it didn’t make it. Them’s the breaks when you’re thirty-two weeks from being born.
The Runton Diaries 